Anatomy of a Scene: 'Amazing Spider-Man'

Oh, Spidey, has it really been five long years since we saw you in “Spider-Man 3,” where you were plagued by a doppelgänger, a hectic plot and franchise exhaustion? Way back then you were played by the cute boy-man Tobey Maguire, and the girl with the fatal-beauty smile was given sweet life by Kirsten Dunst. Now, in “The Amazing Spider-Man,” you’re played by the cute boy-man Andrew Garfield, whose elongated limbs and pencil neck go a ways to make him look like the geek next door. The lovely young miss, meanwhile, is Emma Stone, whose pillowy lips serve as flotation devices that — along with her natural appeal and Mr. Garfield’s likability — keep this resuscitated studio product from fully capsizing.

The director, Marc Webb, does his part. Like his debut feature, the bittersweet romance “(500) Days of Summer,” Mr. Webb’s Spider-Man movie works only because he keeps the whole package, at least until the requisite final blowout, tethered to his two appealing leads. Both look too old for high school (Mr. Garfield turns 29 in August, and Ms. Stone hits the big 24 in November), but then so did the characters introduced by the pen-and-ink legends Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1962. If the readers who embraced the square-looking Peter Parker didn’t mind, maybe it was partly because this awkward outsider spoke to his times, having been bitten by a radioactive spider the same year the United States conducted 36 atmospheric nuclear weapon tests over the Pacific.

The latest post-atomic-age Spider-Man has been updated with a skateboard and a hoodie, but it’s unclear whom he speaks to (beyond Sony’s shareholders), and for what reason. Like the 2002 “Spider-Man,” the first of three movies directed by Sam Raimi, “The Amazing Spider-Man” revisits Peter Parker’s origin story. This time it opens with the child Peter and his parents, Richard and Mary (Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz), who, after a break-in at their house endangering Dad’s scientific secrets, rush over to Richard’s brother and sister-in-law, a k a Uncle Ben and Aunt May (Martin Sheen and Sally Field, a cozy fit). Parking the boy there for safekeeping, the parents weep and hug goodbye — “Be good,” the father portentously tells the son — and within seconds the older, now orphaned Peter is shrinking around school while eyeing his crush, Gwen Stacy (Ms. Stone).

You know the rest: Peter visits a lab (this time a bioengineering outfit, Oscorp), where, along comes a spider, and so on. Suddenly he isn’t in Kansas anymore, or rather, the poignantly vulnerable human form he came in with: He’s faster, stronger, stickier. His hands and feet adhere to everything he touches, though, inexplicably, this tackiness soon subsides. For a few scenes, however, this helps give the movie a lift because Peter, in hormonally challenged adolescent fashion, is taken aback by his scarily, fantastically changing body. When he’s bothered by some toughs on the subway, he jumps up so abruptly he lands on the roof upside down, surprising himself as much as the baddies, who give futile chase while he scrambles up, up and away.

Mr. Webb, wisely leaning on physical stunts and not just computer-generated imagery, exploits Peter’s metamorphosis for a few diverting, palpable sequences, including an extended scene in a desolate warehouse where, alone with his skateboard, he soars high, higher, highest. He also smashes an alarm clock on waking, accidentally snaps door handles off and snatches a fly live out of the air, a buzzy encounter that amusingly brings to mind Norman Bates. It’s too bad that Mr. Webb didn’t make more of Mr. Garfield’s reedy, bobbing-neck resemblance to Anthony Perkins. Like that psycho Norman, who says he wouldn’t hurt a fly, Peter is a divided soul (if nicer), but like Mr. Raimi’s bug boy, it takes him time to figure out who he is physically, metaphysically, existentially.

To be precise, it takes an increasingly dull, drawn-out 136 minutes to work through a story that many moviegoers older than 10 may think they’ve seen because they probably did when the first movie burned up the box office. Some of the characters have changed — here it’s the blond Gwen instead of the redheaded Mary Jane, the green Lizard instead of the Green Goblin, the supercilious Captain Stacy instead of the supersilly newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson — as has the balance between the blue and red on Spidey’s suit. Mr. Webb has given the story intimacy, scaling down a lot of action and handing over screen time to Peter and Gwen’s his-and-her charm. Yet despite this and the snazzier special effects, so much looks, sounds, feels the same, even in Imax and 3-D.

Mr. Garfield and Ms. Stone are by far the movie’s greatest assets and when they’re together on screen, they add warmth and a believable closeness to the industrial mix. (Ms. Field, wearing hippie hair and her trademark indulging smile, also helps keep her scenes real.) Mr. Garfield, who played Eduardo Saverin, Mark Zuckerberg’s aggrieved roommate, in “The Social Network,” comfortably slips into the dual role of Peter Parker and Spider-Man without reinventing either. He’s one of those professionally sensitive young types with a catch in his voice and moony eyes, and has had trouble holding the screen or your interest. Here, though, he responds to Mr. Webb’s close attentions — the director repeatedly pulls off Spider-Man’s mask to show off those puppy eyes — and to Ms. Stone’s generosity as a performer.

All that said, unlike Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins,” which reconceptualized the big-screen franchise, ushering it into the noirish reaches familiar from both the initial comic book and Frank Miller’s 1980s “Dark Knight” redo, this “Spider-Man” feels like one of those unnecessary software versions, more Spider-Man 1.5 than Spider-Man reborn. Mr. Webb either didn’t have a vision for a new — nicer or nastier, stranger or more perverse — Spider-Man, or he and the writers (James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves) weren’t allowed to take true imaginative flight at a company that’s conspicuously banking on a resuscitated franchise to carry it through its next fiscal quarters. Spider-Man’s ethos remains — With great power comes great responsibility — but these days you can’t see his superhero heart and soul for his branding.

“The Amazing Spider-Man” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some hand-to-web combat, child peril and intimations of another New York apocalypse.